Schmidbauer Doing Heavy Lifting for Walney Extension

Van Oord Offshore Wind Projects has contracted the heavy-lift specialist, Schmidbauer Group, to handle the heavy load logistics for the foundation components of the 660MW Walney Extension offshore wind farm in the UK.

The work started in November 2016 and will continue until mid-2017.

Schmidbauer is tasked with unloading, storing and transporting the transition pieces (TPs) weighing up to 600 tonnes and monopiles (MPs) weighing up to 1,030t at the feeder harbor in Belfast.

Here, components of a total of 87 wind turbines are stored and will be taken by tugboats or an installation vessel to the offshore wind farm.

DONG Energy, the owner and operator of the wind farm, started offshore construction works at the site some 19 kilometres off the coast of Cumbria in the second half of February.

The wind farm will consist of 40 8MW MHI Vestas and 47 7MW Siemens wind turbines.

Van Oord was contracted to transport and install the 87 foundations at the site, and the jack-up vessel Seajacks Scylla was hired to transport and install the turbines.

The inter-array cables will be installed by VBMS, and the subsea export cables will be laid by DeepOcean’s Maersk Connector.

Walney Extension, located next to the 367.2MW Walney 1 & 2 offshore wind farms, will be the largest wind farm in the world when built and is expected to be generating clean electricity by 2019.